Recruitment Consulting Expert in APAC ICT Industry

Era of Disruptive Technologies

Last 2 decades have seen immense technological advancements which has lead to shorter product lifecycles and given birth to a concept of disruptive businesses or technologies.

Though the term disruptive technologies was first coined by Clayton M Christensen in 1995, it was in 2009 that this term gained popularity.

A Disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market & value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades) displacing an earlier technology.

There has been disruptive technological advances in almost all industries recently for example, Self driving cars in automobile industry or Golden rice in Genetic Engineering or Crypto-Currencies in Banking Industry etc.

In my views, a major disruption has been created by the invention of internet followed by mobile data invention like the 2G, 3G & now LTE. Apple created a major disruption when they launched the first smartphone, iPhone, and marked the end of GSM phone ages. Many mobile device manufacturing companies were caught by surprise when iPhone was launched. First time the world was introduced to the concept of “app store”.

Various other companies like Samsung, Lenovo, Nokia etc followed suit and came up with their own smartphones but Apple held the first mover advantage. However, it was not long before Samsung came up with the improved android based smartphones with its Galaxy & Note series which works on an improved Google Play store.

At the consumer level, this cut throat competition among the various smartphone companies was boon and they were benefited with the cheaper and better phones.

With this boom in smartphone industry, many application developers came up with innovative apps which changed the way we interact with each other, for example, Grabtaxi, Viki, whatsapp, chaton, Uber etc.

Also, at enterprise level, due to the evolution of cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and mobility, the cost of doing business has went down massively. Any enterprise success now depends on its investment on the techonology. The concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Unified Communication (UC) & work from home has become reality.

It is clear that these evolutions in technology is going to make our world more competitive and organizations will have to be on their toes to continuously develop their products/services, embrace new technological advancements & understand their customer needs . Organizations failing to do this will be quickly find themselves losing their competitive edge, loss in profitability and eventually will be out of business.

For example, once a mobile phone leaders, Nokia failed to react quickly to Apple’s iPhone introduction with an equivalent smartphone. Nokia was once boasting of their reliable GSM mobile phones but didn’t managed to understand the smartphone game and failed to do product innovation and found themselves losing market share and eventually had to sell its phone business to Microsoft.

In the current world, product lifecycles will be shorter hence its very important for companies to invest on their R&D and keep their ears open to their customer needs and react to it quickly.

The only segment which will benefit from the will be the consumer or the customers. They will be able to get a technically sound products at relatively cheaper prices, products will be better in quality & will receive good after sales service from the companies.

Overall, such an environment will benefit the world in which we live, peoples’ standard of living will improve and there will be advancement in all walks of life.

In conclusion, it is a fact that the new wave of disruptive technologies is already on its way and that it will provoke big changes in society. With the right measures, policy makers can facilitate an adequate implementation of the new disruptive technologies to the public wellfare of society.

The key factor to surviving in this dynamic era is to evaluate consumer behavior continuously when society and technologies are evolving faster than a company’s ability to adapt and offer products and services to consumers. Companies should shift their focus beyond surviving the latest disruptive technology to leading by investing in the future needs of the ever changing consumer